Project Scorpio games developed by Microsoft will render natively at 4K

Microsoft and Sony are breaking precedent with plans to release mid-generation console refreshes in the near future. Whether or not gamers buy them in droves remains to be seen but you can rest assured that both sides will do their best to hype the new machines (sometimes at the expense of the other).

Sony at this point has revealed a great deal about its PlayStation 4 Pro. Microsoft, meanwhile, is playing its cards close to its chest, instead electing to reveal details about Project Scorpio in small batches.

The latest tidbit comes courtesy of Microsoft Studios Publishing general manager Shannon Loftis who recently revealed to USA Today that all games they are launching in the Scorpio time frame will run natively at 4K.

The wording here is important – games they are making, meaning first-party titles. What third-party studios do is seemingly up to them.

The admission comes in the wake of the PlayStation 4 Pro's unveiling a couple of weeks ago and Sony’s interpretation of 4K gaming – specifically, the fact that most games won’t be rendered natively in 4K but rather, upscaled. In terms of raw processing power, we already know that Microsoft’s upcoming console will be faster than Sony’s.

Some may argue that the original PlayStation 4 and Xbox One should have had support for 4K resolution from the get-go but that would have required delaying their launch by a couple of years as the hardware available at the time simply wasn’t capable of delivering the processing power to drive that many pixels.

Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro is slated to arrive on November 10 priced at $399. Critically, Microsoft’s Project Scorpio – we don’t even know what it’ll actually be called – won’t hit retail until the 2017 holiday season.

That's a best case scenario. Scorpio is supposed to be slower than a 980 Ti and even that card has to turn down some settings to get 30 FPS at 4k on newer games. 30 FPS at launch with some settings turned down and 10 FPS when it's nearly the end of it's life-cycle.

That's a best case scenario. Scorpio is supposed to be slower than a 980 Ti and even that card has to turn down some settings to get 30 FPS at 4k on newer games. 30 FPS at launch with some settings turned down and 10 FPS when it's nearly the end of it's life-cycle.

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I think its hard to make any comparisons to a consumer GPU when literally the only spec they released was teraflops. Not that im being optimistic - youre probably right.

I think its hard to make any comparisons to a consumer GPU when literally the only spec they released was teraflops. Not that im being optimistic - youre probably right.

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I would like to add, AMD's video cards usually perform lower than their TFlop numbers compared to an Nvidia card with equal TFlops. It's possible for Microsoft to claim all games developed by their game studios will be rendered at 4k but to get good FPS would likely mean going ham on DX 12 and Vulkan, of which we haven't really seen a DX 12 game with miraculous improvements for AMD cards.

Since the TFlop number is generated by this equation Texture Units * Raster Operators * (core clock) = GFLOPS, you can get a pretty good idea of what the card is going to have. The only questions remains is if the architecture yields any improvements.

Considering the sacrifices in image quality that were required to make Halo 5 run at 1080/60, good luck trying to get a game running at 2160/not-a-slideshow on a console.

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Halo 5 dropped down to 810p in demanding scenes.

we all know what's going to happen, games will have dynamic resolutions and will render at 4K only when you are looking at the ground. 6TFLOPs are just not enough to reach 4K even on consoles and I doubt people will like games on medium settings on an expensive console.

I think its hard to make any comparisons to a consumer GPU when literally the only spec they released was teraflops. Not that im being optimistic - youre probably right.

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I would like to add, AMD's video cards usually perform lower than their TFlop numbers compared to an Nvidia card with equal TFlops. It's possible for Microsoft to claim all games developed by their game studios will be rendered at 4k but to get good FPS would likely mean going ham on DX 12 and Vulkan, of which we haven't really seen a DX 12 game with miraculous improvements for AMD cards.

Since the TFlop number is generated by this equation Texture Units * Raster Operators * (core clock) = GFLOPS, you can get a pretty good idea of what the card is going to have. The only questions remains is if the architecture yields any improvements.

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If you check out the 480 vs GeForce 1060 , you will notice on Doom that AMD gets a pretty awesome boost after the DX12 update. Considering the fact that DX12 is on Xbone, both Xbone and DX12 being developed by Microsoft,AND AMD improving miraculously, maybe the Xbone just might be able to hit 4K/30FPS. Anyways it's just a speculation, let's see what happens after it's release...

If you check out the 480 vs GeForce 1060 , you will notice on Doom that AMD gets a pretty awesome boost after the DX12 update. Considering the fact that DX12 is on Xbone, both Xbone and DX12 being developed by Microsoft,AND AMD improving miraculously, maybe the Xbone just might be able to hit 4K/30FPS. Anyways it's just a speculation, let's see what happens after it's release...

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Unfortunately that's on Vulkan. The only performance bump we've seen on DX 12 has been small. As of right now it's a big question mark whether or not that performance can be seen on other APIs.

I am very interested to see their results. I have seen some games drop sub 20fps at 1080, I just cant see that these new console modules have enough "under the hood" to drive 4K@30 let alone 4K@60. The only way for consoles to do this is to seriously limit the graphics quality. One good thing about 4K though and eventually 8K is that it is becoming less and less a need to using AA which has always had a big performance hit.

Also someone mentioned 4K@144 what spec are you using or suggesting can do this. 1080gtx with SLI, and many games don't even hit the 100 mark with much more around the 75-95 mark. With the 1080ti maybe we would hit 120 but expect to pay in excess of £1600 (for sli) for these cards so at the moment its just not viable.